"Those of us that participated in that effort to gain the right to vote, we take it very personally," said Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga. / H. Darr Beiser, USA TODAY

by Richard Wolf, USA TODAY

by Richard Wolf, USA TODAY

WASHINGTON - John Lewis has been marching for voting rights for more than half a century - not long enough, he says, for the Supreme Court to decide that the finish line has been reached.

When he helped lead 600 people across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., in 1965, his fractured skull from an Alabama state trooper's nightstick served as a reminder that the march wasn't over.

When he was elected to Congress from the Atlanta area in 1986, African Americans' 4% representation served as a reminder that the march wasn't over.

Even when Barack Obama was elected president in 2008 and re-elected last year, new laws in the South that made voting more difficult were proof to him that the march still wasn't over.

Don't try to tell Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., an icon of the civil rights movement, that the key section of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 can be retired in 2013 - something the Supreme Court considered Wednesday.

"People ask me all the time whether the election of Barack Obama is a fulfillment of Dr. King's dream. I say no, it's just a down payment," Lewis, 73, says during an interview in his Capitol Hill office, cluttered with photos and memorabilia from the 1960s civil rights movement.

"You may not have what we had, such as the literacy tests, or asking people to count the number of bubbles in a bar of soap or the number of jelly beans in a jar. It may not be the overt acts of violence that we had and witnessed during the '60s. But the result is the same."

Lewis is at the forefront of a civil rights community galvanized by the court's consideration of Shelby County v. Holder, which deals with Section 5 - the provision in the law that requires all or parts of 16 states to clear proposed voting changes with the Justice Department or a federal court. A decision is expected by June.

What Lewis brings to the debate that scores of lawyers, legislators and legal scholars don't is a biography littered with beatings, arrests and incarceration for peaceful bus rides, marches and sit-ins. From 1960 to 1966, he was arrested 40 times. At the time, he was a founder and eventual chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, rubbing elbows in his early 20s with civil rights leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr.

It was a time, he recalls in a brief to the court, of "boycotts, sit-ins, freedom rides, jail marches, fire hoses, literacy tests, billy clubs, poll taxes, tear gas, burning crosses, lynchings in the night, church bombings and drive-by murders."

Lewis recites the dates, even the precise hours of beatings as if they were yesterday - from the interracial Freedom Riders bus trip in 1961 to the infamous attack on the march he led in Selma in 1965. He still bears a scar on his head from that one.

"I really thought I was going to die at the bridge. I thought I saw death," he recalls. "I thought it was the last protest."

As a result of his experience, Lewis adopts the exact opposite conclusion reached by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, the court's only African-American member, when it comes to the future of the Voting Rights Act.

Four years ago, Thomas opposed letting Section 5 remain on the books. He decried what he called "outdated assumptions about racial attitudes in the covered jurisdictions" and said that greatly reduced voting discrimination in the South represented "an acknowledgement of victory."

Lewis, on the other hand, sees each step forward as an opportunity for Southern lawmakers to try new ways of targeting black and other minority voters. If history moved only in one direction, he argues, blacks in the South would not have been denied the right to vote nearly a century after his great-great-grandfather - a former slave - was given that right under the 15th Amendment.

Similarly, he argues in his brief, Texas, Florida and South Carolina would not have followed Obama's election with laws requiring photo ID at the polls, limiting early voting hours and altering district lines in ways that "suppress, dilute and infringe upon minorities' constitutional right to vote."

Most of those laws were blocked by Section 5's requirements.

"Those of us that participated in that effort to gain the right to vote, we take it very personally," Lewis says. "I take it personally."